Quote:
Originally Posted by aussenseiter
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Sojourn had no case no matter how many pretty flowers they put on it, because they didn't own the engine that ran their game. DIKU group did.
Notice that Sojourn never filed a complaint.
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That's why there never was any legal action from Sojourn (I don't know
who instigated the look into EQ's code; possibly lawyers from Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet, aka DIKU), but they most certainly had a "moral" case, or a right to be aggrieved by Brad McQuaid's wholesale plagiarism of almost all gameplay concepts from Sojourn. In almost every possible way, Everquest is just a port of SojournMUD to a graphical engine, just with namechanges for the cities and gods and whatnot. Literally down to the general stat spread of the races.
Nearly every mechanical aspect is lifted directly from that MUD. There are some exceptions, such as mana instead of traditional D&D's "Vancian magic" system where you memorize x 1st level spells, y 2nd level spells, etc. But all in all, Everquest is a shameless copycat job of Sojourn, so much so that if that MUD
was a commercial product with its own IP, it would have automatically won a lawsuit against EQ.
But since it wasn't, there was no basis for it. Still, the fact remains that old Brad and his crew were not quite the creative geniuses that some suppose. He basically just grabbed a game he had played and translated it to a different engine. It was only ever legal because the game he plagiarized had no commercial rights of its own, due to the fact that the DIKU license expressly prohibits this. Still, the consternation over Everquest's genesis did have some merit, given how it all went down. It's just that since SojournMUD had a few hundred players, their grievances were pretty meaningless.